Batting Rocks Over the Barn: An Iowa Farm Boy's Odyssey

In Batting Rocks Over the Barn, readers will experience much of what was expected from earnest boys in the 1950s on a 340-acre Iowa farm -- one that has been in his family since 1855. It was a farm that delivered milk, eggs and pork to the American food table. The writer was subjected to a work ethic and a discipline that created stories which he later brought to life in newspaper farm columns. Whimsically, he tells of his twin brother getting a pilot's license, then taking farm neighbors on rides over their fields of straight corn rows and tiny cows. He writes about taking a baby pig to school to show his class how they are vaccinated and had their sharp teeth clipped. There is the story about the liquid molasses barrel exploding and fiercely coating him in hot, black, sweetness intended for cows. There is commentary on recess time at the one-room country school, the rituals of mowing alfalfa fields in June and walking the cornfields in August to pull up cocklebur and butter print weeds. The writer describes a Holstein cow delivering her calf in the rain in a distant corner of the pasture. The reader sees how massive concrete silos are filled each fall with chopped corn that becomes silage. There's the pathos of farm cats born as spring kittens unprepared to survive the harshly cold, snowy winters. Readers learn the patterns of planting and harvest, cycles repeated again and again. Snow melt and spring rains would cause creeks to overflow, triggering an idea of the writer's brother to get into a steel bathtub and try floating downstream, only to survive a spill in the freezing water. One can almost smell the cow barn, almost hear the cacophony of the guinea hens and witness the rattle of steel stanchions that confined the cows to the barn in the dead of winter. Read more